IEEE\/OSA Journal of Optical Communications and Networking 

Abstract: As the Internet expands in reach and capacity, the energy consumption of network equipment increases. To date, the cost of transmission and switching equipment has been considered to be the major barrier to growth of the Internet. But energy consumption rather than cost of the component equipment may eventually become a barrier to continued growth. Research efforts on ldquogreening the Internetrdquo have been initiated in recent years, aiming to develop energy-efficient network architectures and operational strategies so as to reduce the energy consumption of the Internet. The direct benefits of such efforts are to reduce the operational costs in the network and cut the greenhouse footprint of the network. Second, from an engineering point of view, energy efficiency will assist in reducing the thermal issues associated with heat dissipation in large data centers and switching nodes. In the present research, we concentrate on minimizing the energy consumption of an IP over WDM network. We develop efficient approaches ranging from mixed integer linear programming (MILP) models to heuristics. These approaches are based on traditional virtual-topology and traffic grooming designs. The novelty of the framework involves the definition of an energy-oriented model for the IP over WDM network, the incorporation of the physical layer issues such as energy consumption of each component and the layout of optical amplifiers in the design, etc. Extensive optimization and simulation studies indicate that the proposed energy-minimized design can significantly reduce energy consumption of the IP over WDM network, ranging from 25% to 45%. Moreover, the proposed designs can also help equalize the power consumption at each network node. This is useful for real network deployment, in which each node location may be constrained by a limited electricity power supply. Finally, it is also interesting and useful to find that an energy-efficient network design is also a cost-efficient design because of the fact that IP router ports play a dominating role in both energy consumption and network cost in the IP over WDM network.

Abstract: We consider channel characterization for underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) systems. We focus on the channel impulse response and, in particular, quantify the channel time dispersion for different water types, link distances, and transmitter/receiver characteristics, taking into account realistic parameters. We use the Monte Carlo approach to simulate the trajectories of emitted photons propagating in water from the transmitter towards the receiver. During their propagation, photons are absorbed or scattered as a result of their interaction with different particles present in water. To model angle scattering, we use the two-term Henyey-Greenstein model in our channel simulator. We show that this model is more accurate than the commonly used Henyey-Greenstein model, especially in pure sea waters. Through the numerical results that we present, we show that, except for highly turbid waters, the channel time dispersion can be neglected when working over moderate distances. In other words, under such conditions, we do not suffer from any inter-symbol interference in the received signal. Lastly, we study the performance of a typical UWOC system in terms of bit-error-rate using the simple on-off-keying modulation. The presented results give insight into the design of UWOC systems.

Abstract: The wavelength-division-multiplexed passive optical network (WDM-PON) is considered to be the next evolutionary solution for a simplified and future-proofed access system that can accommodate exponential traffic growth and bandwidth-hungry new applications. WDM-PON mitigates the complicated time-sharing and power budget issues in time-division-multiplexed PON (TDM-PON) by providing virtual point-to-point optical connectivity to multiple end users through a dedicated pair of wavelengths. There are a few hurdles to overcome before WDM-PON sees widespread deployment. Several key enabling technologies for converged WDM-PON systems are demonstrated, including the techniques for longer reach, higher data rate, and higher spectral efficiency. The cost-efficient architectures are designed for single-source systems and resilient protection for traffic restoration. We also develop the integrated schemes with radio-over-fiber (RoF)-based optical-wireless access systems to serve both fixed and mobile users in the converged optical platform.

Abstract: In this paper, a power and bandwidth efficient pulsed modulation technique for optical wireless (OW) communication is proposed. The scheme is called optical spatial modulation (OSM). In OSM, multiple transmit units exist where only one transmitter is active at any given time instance. The spatially separated transmit units are considered as spatial constellation points. Each unique sequence of incoming data bits is mapped to one of the spatial constellation points, i.e., activating one of the transmit units. This is the fundamental concept of the spatial modulation (SM) technique. In OW communication systems, the active transmitter radiates a certain intensity level at a particular time instance. At the receiver side, the optimal SM detector is used to estimate the active transmitter index. An overall increase in the data rate by the base 2 logarithm of the number of transmit units is achieved. The optical MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) channel and the channel impulse response are obtained via Monte Carlo simulations by applying ray tracing techniques. It will be shown in this paper that the optical MIMO channel is highly correlated if transmitter and receiver locations are not optimized, which results in a significant power penalty. The power efficiency can be improved by increasing the number of receive units to enhance receive diversity and/or by using soft and hard channel coding techniques. Conversely, it is shown that aligning transmit and receive units creates nearly uncorrelated channel paths and results in substantial enhancements in system performance even as compared to the diversity or coding gain. The resultant aligned scheme is shown to be very efficient in terms of power and bandwidth as compared to on-off keying, pulse position modulation, and pulse amplitude modulation. In this paper also, the upper bound bit error ratios of coded and uncoded OSM are analyzed. The analytical results are validated via Monte Carlo simulations and the results demonstrate a close match.

Abstract: Power consumption and the footprint of future network elements are expected to become the main limiting factors for scaling the current architectures and approaches to capacities of hundreds of terabits or even petabits per second. Since the underlying demand for network capacity can be satisfied only by contemporaneously increasing transmission bit rate, processing speed, and switching capacity, it unavoidably will lead to increased power consumption of network nodes. On the one hand, using optical switching fabrics could relax the limitations to some extent, but large optical buffers occupy larger areas and dissipate more power than electronic ones. On the other hand, electronic technology has made fast progress during the past decade regarding reduced feature size and decreased power consumption. It is expected that this trend will continue in the future. This paper addresses power consumption issues in future high-capacity switching and routing elements and examines different architectures based on both pure packet-switched and pure circuit-switched designs by assuming either all-electronic or all-optical implementation, which can be seen as upper and lower bounds regarding power consumption. The total power consumption of a realistic and appropriate technology for future high-performance core network nodes would probably lie somewhere between those two extreme cases. Our results show that implementation in optics is generally more power efficient; especially circuit-switched architectures have a low power consumption. When taking into account possible future developments of Si CMOS technology, even very large electronic packet routers having capacities of more than hundreds of terabits per second seem to be feasible. Because circuit switching is more power efficient and easier to implement in optics than pure packet switching, the scalability limitation due to increased power consumption could be considerably relaxed when a kind of dynamic optical circuit switching is used within the core network together with an efficient flow aggregation at edge nodes.